


Hell Is Where You Meet The Person You Could Have Been

by Stoney



Category: Angel: the Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-26
Updated: 2012-01-26
Packaged: 2017-10-30 04:19:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/327647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stoney/pseuds/Stoney
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Four Bible Stories with a Jossian Twist - Angel, Wesley, Gunn, Connor.  GENERAL SPOILERS FOR THE SERIES. (Links to the images they're based on are within the body of the story. (Originally published on LJ, February 2007.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hell Is Where You Meet The Person You Could Have Been

[Not my Will, But Thine Be Done](http://www.marxist.com/images/goya2/saturn.jpg)

1

Newborns had their own unique smell. Like love and hope and warmth all in a soft fuzzy package. Delicious. He was happy. Not _that_ sort of happy, because his joy was wrapped up in fear of the baby getting sick or dying or not getting into Notre Dame or maybe not being able to stand in the sunlight like him or looking too much like his mother and what if his perfect, delicate skin was ever cut? How red the blood would look on that white, creamy skin. How he would _cry_.

Angel was drinking more. He barely registered that. Everything was heightened, his smell, his emotions, his hunger. He kissed and touched every square inch of his son, little foot pads, the wrinkles of fat at the baby's wrists, the soft pulsing membrane at the top of Connor's head. So weak and delicate, babies. Would Connor be strong? Was he even human? What would he think when he realized what Angel really was? The people he'd killed, the damage he had wreaked. Would he understand?

He didn't tell Wesley or Cordy about the dreams where he fed from his son and how delicious he tasted. Or how powerful he felt with that innocent blood in his mouth.

He stopped bringing the baby to sleep in his bed for fear of his dreams. He finally let the others hold Connor when his mouth began to salivate every time the baby cried.

 

*******

[My Brother's Keeper](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Cain_leadeth_abel_to_death_tissot.jpg) 2

Years later, Wesley would attempt to kill his own father, his hatred and agony from a childhood ignored emptying out of him with every casing from his gun's clip. As for now, he only knew death was coming for him swiftly, that the prophesy was wrong and perhaps they had all been wrong. He was a man who put his faith into words, and the words had failed him utterly. 

Favoritism. Wesley's father had favored the Council over his own flesh and bone. God had favored the younger, wilder and beautiful Abel, and then marked Cain for all to see his insignificance. Wesley touched the ragged hole in his neck where Justine's knife entered. He had always imagined Cain cutting Abel's head off with the boy's plough. Always favored, always loved. Always the chosen one. Had he taken a trophy? Had Cain left a nightmare in his father's tent for him to find? 

It wasn't his hand that had killed Connor, but it may as well have been. The blood pumping hot and thick from his neck slowed to a trickle and the stars in the sky grew into fuzzy haloes. He imagined Angel's face as he realized his son was gone - his favored son. He wondered what Adam thought when he found the head of his child on his pillow. The holly leaves poked deep into Wesley's cheek, but the blood didn't come. No one came.

********

[Doest Thou Well To Be Angry?](http://www.isidore-of-seville.com/viewer/viewer.html?http://www.pitts.emory.edu/woodcuts/1712BiblA/00002447.jpgluxfiathttp://www.pitts.emory.edu/woodcuts/1712BiblA/00002447.jpgluxfiat602luxfiat902) 3

Moment of clarity. He was only allowed one with each encounter and it was the same every time. His momma'd had an old Bible with pictures that he used to spend hours looking at when he was little. There was a painting of some white dude being eaten up by a huge fish or shark The story said the man took the easy way out of working for God and didn't like how God was there for everybody. That his kind wasn't special, favored above all others. So God send a big nasty to teach him a lesson. He lived inside that fish for three days, had a change of heart, which, hell _yeah_ you're gonna have a change of heart, then that fish spit him out and the man became a prophet of God.

He'd had countless nightmares growing up about being trapped inside a fish. He didn't think it would be like Geppetto and Pinocchio fishing off their boat inside a whale. He thought it would be cold and slimy and tight, an overpowering stench of rotting death, and the fish's stomach acids eating away your skin. Come out lookin' like Michael with all them white spots and shit.

And every time he hit that bottom step on his way to get lightbulbs and a _thing_ stepped out of the shadows ready to carve him up, Gunn flashed back to being eight years old and staring into the wild eyes of that man of God being swallowed by a fish. How the fish's eyes rolled back, covered in a white membrane. How God really didn't like people to do for themselves. He hoped no one would hear his prayer. He would forsake mercy as the price for his vanity.

 

********

[The Sacrifice Of The Lord's Passover](http://newlit.ru/~zuev/002094.jpg) 4

Angel had tried multiple times to push them away. Everyone who stayed by his side suffered. Except for Spike, but Angel had always assumed Spike was a special form of punishment that he had to endure, so. .He'd had a plan. He didn't always. The plan came together in the end, and he had warned them. They'd already lost so much before the final battle, and he was getting tired of shepherding the weak through the valley of darkness. But they had all agreed, so.

It hadn't been forty years of wandering with his team, but it had felt almost as long. Especially during the non-corporeal Spike months. He had taken them into the desert and they hadn't all come out. Doyle, Cordelia, Fred, Wesley, Gunn... All gone. Angel would have gladly lain himself on an altar, would have given himself up so the others could have lived. But he didn't get to choose how redemption was given.

The city lay in ashes and ruin. Somewhere on this earth it was still green, and he knew Connor lived. He hoped that the future would be in the hands of the son. The days of the father were done.

1Saturn Devours His Son, Goya  
2 Cain Leading Abel To his Death, James Tissot  
3 Medieval Woodcut of Jonah Swallowed By A Whale  
4 Untitled Apocalypse, Zdzislaw Beksinski 


End file.
